Saturday, December 11, 2010

Three Poems

THE ROOMS

to L. A.

Of all worlds, this one is yours.
Not the sunny world of laughter.
Nor the dour world sad to the core.
No. This one is yours. You are love’s
miracle. You live where light floods
your body. Your dark eyes buoys.
Your body a hymn to the Jerusalems
there are, as many as are inhabited
by words. And this is my room.
I rent your heart without a lease.
Soon these pockets, threadbare,
will lose what I carried there.
A pagan with too little care
for his own heart’s core.

(11 December 2010)

SATURN’S CHILDREN

after Goya

Look how he devours his spawn, ravenous father:
Clutching his child’s body with both hands
shoving what remains into the maw
of corruption. The dead child’s blood
dripping from his gulping, wheezing, gasping stare . . .
Eyes crazed. No portals there to soul.

How you survived, my love, I do not and can
never know the pain that haunts the light in your eyes.
Goya balancing his bent body on two canes,
white hair flourishing, eyes alert, in search
of monsters disguised as reason,
in the year of his death: "And still I learn."

again, to L.

(II: 11 December 2010)

YOUR BOWL

L.,

is your way of learning to live,
from blood to bone to flesh to breathe
your one way, and if love fills the hollow
this vessel holds all you are on your own
amid the melee, the city in ruins.
I, late for my baptismal, chose to run
with wolves. Prodigal, who would tend,
nurture the calm that feeds your solitude?
Having asked, I stir the fire, till the earth,
broadcast our seed, water the air we breathe
–only when the line between life and death
is frozen in my tongue, hot on my face,
mouth empty with fear, do I fill your bowl
with one word forsaken by all others.

Drink long. Remember me. My love for you,
yours for me, remain long after you go
to be what you are, were always, will ever be
in the moon’s ghetto, the sun’s bright garden.
When we disappear, what there was of us
that was true will appear in our shared dream.